Labour Statistics for a Market Economy: Challenges and Solutions in the Transition Countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

The International Labour Office is the moving force behind the adoption of the Labour Force Survey in Western countries as the only reliable means of gathering information about trends in employment and unemployment, and on pay. The countries of East-Central Europe and the former USSR have recognized their need of such statistiics and turned to the ILO to help them set up systems to provide data required by decision makers. This pioneering work shows how the old command economies are setting up brand new systems to classify occupations, to measure employment and unemployment, and to collect information on wages and labour costs, which will be useful to students of the area and essential for statisticians world-wide concerned with the challenge of instigating an entirely new statistical service.

Igor Chernyshev Member of the ILO Bureau of Statistics since 1986, he previously worked with the Central Statistical Office of Ukraine. He holds a Master's degree in Economics and Statistics from the Kiev State University. His responsibility has been the ILO-comparable employment and unemployment estimates project, which has resulted in the regular publication of comparable data since 1990. He is currently organizing and coordinating the ILO technical support in the field of labour statistics to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.